With Basic Training over and done, I was on my way to Biloxi, Mississippi to Keesler Air Force Base to attend Electronics training. The school at Keesler was the biggest one in the Air Force and, as it turned out, this was where I would spend the next 4 years. You lived in barracks, just like in basic, except now we had separate rooms that we shared with a roommate. The inspections continued, however, and everything was still military.
Once a month on a Saturday morning, we would all gather on the tarmac of the air field and have what was called a “parade”. It just meant we all got into formation and marched around a little and showed off for the officers. It was actually kind of fun. As long as you followed the rules, the Air Force wasn’t half bad. It was when you didn’t want to go with the program that you had trouble. Nobody cared about your opinion of anything. You did what you were told or else you suffered.
We went to class 6 hours a day and then used the rest of the day to study or do details, like KP (Kitchen Police) which is like you see in the movies. You peel potatoes or wash dishes or mop floors or do some other job that needs to be done. You got KP about once a month for a couple hours, so it wasn’t really that bad. There were so many students on the base, that the work was divided among several thousand people.
I saw a lot of movies while at Keesler, both as a student and later. There was a theater in Biloxi that played three Sci-Fi movies every Saturday afternoon. Since I basically had no life – there were practically no girls on the base, I went to the movies every Saturday. I have seen just about every Sci-Fi or monster movie made before 1950. Surprisingly, I am still a fan.
Sometimes we tried to get a date with one of the town girls, but they saw so many airmen that you had to be something really special to attract a local girl. I was anything but special and so spent most of my Air Force career just hanging around with the other guys.
I took classes in something called “Airborne Navigational Equipment Repair”. What that meant was every aircraft that flew had equipment on it which helped the pilot know where to go. Navigational Equipment. It’s very sophisticated now, but in the 60’s it’s was still pretty basic. We thought it was cool at the time, though. I took classes in something called “Omni” and another piece of equipment called “TACAN”. These were acronyms. TACAN stands for TACtical Air Navigation and you can look it up on Wikipedia if you want to know more. “Omni” didn’t really stand for anything, but it implied that it could pick up a signal from any direction.
At any rate, the planes (jets) carried this equipment and every now and then it would break down. Someone had to fix it and that was what I was learning to do. It was pretty cool. I enjoyed it a lot. I learned a lot about electronics and I learned how this equipment worked and how to fix it when it didn’t. The class lasted about 9 months.
More tomorrow…
Dad